Wisdom from the ayahuasca traditions

What can amazonian traditions teach us about set and setting, the role of consent and how to advertise psychedelics?

I’m going to approach psychedelic safety and best practices from a very peculiar perspective which is the lens of the ayahuasca traditions, both indigenous and religious. The underlying question being: Can the western psychedelic scene learn about safety and best practices from these traditions?

The reason why I came to have opinions about this topic, almost 20 years ago, I started working in a documentary project about ayahuasca. Back then ayahuasca was a lot less well-known than it is today. We knew so little that we actually thought that it would be possible to make a film that would be a sort of family picture of all the ayahuasca traditions, the different churches, the different indigenous groups. We wanted to make a film where you could see everybody, like a family album of all the different manifestations of ayahuasca. We were young and ignorant, after we set off on this quest, it took us a number of years to realize that it was going to be impossible. The world of ayahuasca traditions is too rich, too diverse, there were too many manifestations to fit into one film, 10 films, or maybe even in 20 films.

Santo Daime & Barquinha churches, Acre. Brazil.

The positive thing that came out of our attempt was that we visited many different groups, spent time with them, interviewed them, drank ayahuasca with them. We were trying to understand how each of them felt about ayahuasca, how they worked with it, what was different about them. In the process we were exposed to a very wide sample of what is a very wide spectrum of traditional uses of ayahuasca. This is this is how I came to collect many stories about traditional uses of ayahuasca, some of which I’ll share some of you today.

Accumulated wisdom / accumulated expertise

One idea I’ve come back to again and again in these 20 years is the concept of accumulated wisdom or accumulated expertise. It seemed to me that was what I was finding in all the different traditions, a lot of accumulated expertise. This made me think not just of indigenous people, but also other examples, like the way the Mediterranean cultures make wine, or the way all we ride bicycles, or drive cars. These are all examples of accumulated expertise. The result of many years of collective trial and error, which builds into a system of rules that serves of minimize the problems and maximize the benefits of a practice. If you think about how many things had to happen before we could drive cars, from where the steering wheel, break pedal and the accelerator are, to the white lines painted on the roads, the road signs, the driver licenses… All of these systems were slowly developed through decades of collective work, to arrive to a today where many people can drive cars very fast and quite safely. Of course accidents still happen but we can say that compared with the past we’ve greatly minimized them.

This is what I mean by accumulated expertise or accumulated wisdom and this is the lens through which I am going to approach Ayahusaca traditions in this particular piece. I know this is a very limited and a very limiting lens to look at something as big a traditions. Traditions, specially indigenous ones, are much more than good safety practices, they are cosmology, mythology, they are collections of people’s culture and feeling. So, I want to recognize how incredibly rich tradition can be, before I focus on this very limited aspect of it.

Don Ignacio, 2006

I spent a number of years looking at the practices of people who have been using ayahuasca for a long time. This fascinated me because I come from a culture, Western European culture, for which psychedelics are very new. There’s debate on whether in a remote past Europeans might have had a relationship with substances similar to ayahuasca, but there is no debate that if that was the case, it’s been long lost. So that means my culture has very few points of reference from which to understand psychedelics.

Every time people have a new technology, object or practice, for which they have no points of reference they tend towards experimentation. They just try different things to see what happens. If I gave you a book and you didn’t know what a book was you might think it was an object that is good for sitting on, or you might think that it is something that you can use to keep the door open, or you might think that a book is a very useful thing to make a bonfire, or even as some sort of toilet paper! This is what I mean by experimentation, when something is completely new, and you don’t know how to approach it, you experiment with it, put it in terms of something you already know, or both.

As an example I’ll tell a personal story. The first time that I took a plant teacher in an indigenous context was in the year 2000, in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. I took morning glory seeds (ololiuqui ) with an indigenous healer. I was very excited because while I had read a lot about shamanism, I’d never experienced a traditional ceremony. It was only three of us, we took the seeds, and after some time the old man started turning to me and asking “Are you feeling it? Did it grab you already?” and then, when I said yes, he said “Very well now it’s your turn. You have to speak, you have to speak out loud ,and you have to ask God what it is that you want God to give you.”

This question triggered in my head a long chain of very confusing thoughts and reflections that kept me busy all night. I won’t go into detail, I will just say that I while the psychedelic experience that I was having that night was not entirely unknown to me, the application was. I had experienced states like that before, with my friends in Europe in the United States. I was familiar with this experience, but I had never ever actually considered that you could use this experience to think about what it was it that you wanted to ask to have in your life.

What you do with a book when you don’t know what a book is? If you give a book to a person that has never seen a book, how long is it going take before they figure out the best possible use for it? If you give a car to someone who’s never driven, how long will it take for them to figure it out? I don’t have an answer to that, but what I can say is that after that night I became very interested in the traditional use of psychedelics, because for me it became a reference point. Just like if you were if you decided to make wine from scratch you might be well advised to look at the way the mediterranean people have been growing and making wine for centuries. Suddenly I realized that if one paid attention to people who have been using these plans for much longer than ourselves we can find a reference, whole set of accumulated expertise to maximize benefits and minimize dangers.

Don Iligio, Sierra de Oaxaca, 2000

About dietas, set & setting

So today I would like to share two examples, of many, of this wisdom that I found particularly enlightening or clarifying. The first example has to do with the concept of the dieta. This concept gets confusing because the word refers to a couple of different things. There’s the Amazonian plant dieta, where a person spends a long time in isolation in a cabin in the jungle, taking plants. Today I’m going to talk about the other dieta, the dieta that happens 2-3 days to a week before one drinks ayahuasca. This is something that I don’t hear about so much nowadays, but it seemed like in the early 2000s there were endless discussions about this topic in the ayahuasca forums. While we were filming different traditions everybody we met agreed that a few days before you drink ayahuasca and a few days after you drink ayahuasca there was a number of things that you shouldn’t do, a dieta that you had to keep. This list was pretty much everywhere, however from one place to another the contents of the list changed. So in one place people said that you absolutely shouldn’t eat pork, in other places that you absolutely couldn’t have sex, or salt, or sugar. You couldn’t have papaya in some places, and in other places you could, but you couldn’t have beans… The lists changed from place to place and from tradition to tradition. You couldn’t really find a universal elements that everyone avoided, although some elements came up more often, like spicy foods, pork, and sex.

So, is there is a lesson here that can be learned here? I’ve spent many years looking at this and thinking about this. On the way I’ve often met more scientific minded people who dismiss the dieta, because they believe that the dieta is a sort of counter indication. For example, you cannot you cannot mix barbiturates with alcohol, because they potentiate each other, that’s a counter indication. So people think that if the dieta rule says that you cannot eat pork before drinking ayahuasca, and then you eat pork and you drink ayahuasca and nothing happens, then people think that the rule is wrong, or superstitious, an empty taboo. But I think that’s a short sighted conclusion, dieta restrictions are not counter indications, they are safety rules. Wearing a set belt is a safety rule, we’d never say: I went driving my car and I didn’t wear my seatbelt, and nothing happened to me, so why should I ever wear a seatbelt? It doesn’t do anything. I think dietas are closer to safety rules than to counter indications, like seat belts, they might not always apply, but they are always important.

Perhaps there is also a deeper wisdom, a deeper lesson that comes with the dieta, and which doesn’t have to do so much with the lists themselves, with the types of foods or situations to be avoided, but with a deeper understanding of what’s about to happen. When you engage with ayahausca are going to embark in what can be a very powerful, very significant experience, and the question is: how are you going to wrap this experience?

The more scientifically minded people would again say, what does the wrapping matter? This is about psychoactive substances having an effect on the brain for a limited amount of time. To these people I always say: what is the difference between giving you a gift by itself, or giving you a gift in a beautiful box with beautiful wrapping? If one is going to be deeply logical there is no difference between the two, the gist is the same, the wrapper gets discarded. But the thing is, human beings are not deeply logical. We live in a world that is not just made of atoms, it’s also made of symbols, of gestures, of intentions, of words. Humans live in a material world of physics while being deeply affected by inmaterial (and often abstract) things. That’s why when you wrap a gift with a beautiful paper, it makes the gift better for other humans, because now the experience involves not just getting the gift, but the process of opening it. I could say much more about this, but I’ll just say that gifts are wrapped because they we know wrapping makes gifts better, they become more special. Indeed, the wrapper is a way of showing that what it’s inside is special.

I believe what happens to people during ayahuasca is also special. Sometimes it is even very special, from that perspective, putting safety aside for a second, the dieta is also a gesture that says because something special will be happening in three days’ time, I’m not going to do certain things I normally do. This act is a sort of wrapper, a symbol, a gesture, an intention, a protection that feeds into the experience, wrapping the experience, and making its specialness more visible, better.

From this perspective, there’s a lot to say about how modern psychedelic experiences are currently “wrapped.” There’s of course, a lot of talk about set and setting in psychedelic science, but when I compare some of the things I’ve witnessed in the traditions, with the skill on set and setting that I see on some Western psychedelic proposals… well

An example of “wrapper” in a psychedelic clinic

Proselytism, publicity and advertising

The second story has to do with proselytism (or, if you prefer advertising) that is, with this question: What should ayahuasca drinkers do about other people who do not know ayahuasca? Most Westerners have been drinking ayahuasca less that 15 years, so we’ve only had to deal with the question for a short time, but in places like Acre in Brazil, which is the cradle of the ayahuasca religions, some people have been dealing with the fact that you drink ayahuasca but your neighbors might not, for more than three generations... So, how do they deal with this? What is the accumulated wisdom of the Santo Daime around how do to deal with your neighbors / friends / family who don’t drink ayahuasca?

There a saying of the Santo Daime I like very much: “The Daime is for everyone, but not everyone is for the Daime.” It encapsulates a certain accumulated wisdom that could only come from real world experience: While the ayahuasca experience might feel as potentially beneficial for just about everybody, in fact it is not. Psychedelics are not for everybody, they never will be. Full stop. For some people they will always be a bad idea.

There’s a Daime practice that follows this insight, and that I find really insightful, in the Daime you’re not allowed to invite other people to come drink ayahuasca with you. Now, this doesn’t mean the Daime is not open to outsiders, quite the opposite, the doors of the temple are always open. In Brazil, pretty much anybody can walk in into a Daime temple and ask to participate, and after some questions and some screening, they will be welcomed in. So the doors are open, however, members of the church are not allowed to go to other people and say “I drank ayahuasca and it did me really good, and I think you should try it.” They are allowed to say “I drank ayahuasca it did me really good” they’re not allowed to say “…and I think you should try.”

Proselytism is forbidden in the Daime and in this way they stand apart from almost all other christian traditions, where proselytism is very much an encouraged act. Here is a christian religion that explicitly forbids members from inviting others to join! Some people have argued that this rule came out of the political situation in Acre in the 60s and 70s when the Daime religion was regarded with suspicion by the local authorities. But I think that there is a deeper wisdom in the rule, and it has to do with the understanding that the ayahuasca experience is potentially so life-changing, it can have such an effect on people’s lives, that nobody should take upon themselves the responsibility of telling others that this is something that they should try, or do. The decision to partake can only come from the people themselves. While the temple is open for anyone who is called to try, they should come out of their own accord.

I heard someone say once that the main contraindication of ayahuasca is NOT wanting to drink ayahuasca. You should never drink ayahuasca if you don’t want to, for there’s a big chance that it is going to be horrible. Sometimes I say that psychedelics are like a kiss, if you want a kiss, it can be the most tender, intimate experience, if you don’t want a kiss, it can be disgusting, intrusive and horrible. The kiss is the same, but for certain things, specially the most intimate, there’s a wrapper that changes everything, it is called consent. The deeper insight here is that the role of consent in ayahuasca, and in psychedelics, is huge. It can be the difference between a good and a bad trip. Daimistas, because they’ve been in this game much longer than us, understand that consent is key, and that when it comes to experiences potentially as life changing as these, out of precaution, one should not make recommendations.

To me, this is another example of how inspiring some of the practices that come from the traditions can be for us, even as we stand very far from their reality. This example has deeper implications, for example, when we think of psychedelics as prescription medicines, that is, psychedelics as medicines your doctor recommends you to take. Should doctors decide for you, like they decide you should take antibiotics? Or should there be a more careful dialogue? If a doctor prescribes a psychedelic to you, and you have a bad experience, will you blame your doctor? I would. But if I’d decided to take it, and then I had a bad experience, that’s different.

This story also has implications for advertising. Should psychedelics be advertised, that is, recommended to strangers? Again, the accumulated expertise of the traditions suggests that this should be considered carefully, because ayahuasca is potentially life transforming, recommending ayahuasca cannot be like recommending restaurants, vacation spots, or car brands. Indeed in our society most products that can be life changing, like complex financial products, alcohol, tobacco and others, cannot be marketed the same way other less powerful products are.

When tradition is not enough

On the topic of advertising, I will present one last example that comes from a group working in Europe. The facilitators are not Amazonian, but they learned with traditional healers in Perú. As they did their work in Europe they encountered a similar issue: How should they grow? How should newcomers join the group? Here’s an example of a situation where the traditions cannot offer much in terms of accumulated wisdom, or accumulated expertise, because it is a new context.

What happens when you take ayahuasca out of the small communities out of which it originated? For one thing, in an urban context it’s much harder to tell good practitioners from bad practitioners. In the traditional community context people knew who had a good reputation and who didn’t, who cured well and who didn’t cure so well. Everybody knew who had three decades of experience and who only had three years, but as we move away from the communities of origin this is much harder to know, and this goes for not just the providers but also for the participants. In a community environment people usually know their neighbors, they know their story, they know their family, they know their particularities, they know their problems, they know their previous history, and the community also sort of knew how the brew affected people. If person was having problems with what we now call integrating, this would be known by the community. These are some examples of the things that are lost when ayahuasca traveled out of its traditional context and into urban contexts.

So the group working in Europe had undergone traditional training in Peru, found out that the training prepared them for many things, but not for certain new realities. Such as, how should the group grow? How should newcomers join the group?

The way they solved it is through what they call “sponsorship.” In this model someone can only join the circle by being sponsored by a existing member. Your sponsor is not just the person who introduces you to the group, the sponsor becomes responsible for the person that has come in, they vouch for them, they will help with follow-up, and they will stay in touch with the new member after the experience, to make sure the person is ok.

Two interesting things about this system. One, this system works without advertising, just word of mouth, which makes the group grow organically, through circles of trust, friends of friends. This system is slower than advertising, but improves screening, minimizes accidents and creates more cohesive groups. Two, it involves the entire group in the task of keeping track of each other. Why is this is necessary? Because in a traditional context people lived in communities where everyone could see how the rest was doing. If someone was having troubles after ayahuasca, they could hear through the neighbors. But in our modern urban societies even when the ritual is very much traditional, the context is no longer traditional. In our urban settings a group of strangers gets together for a weekend ceremony, and then disband, after the sessions their paths will not cross outside. In this context its is difficult to do the type of follow up that in the communities happens almost by itself. I believe it’s because reasons like these, because of this new context and because the new necessities that arise out of these new contexts, that we are also beginning to see the emergence of new sets of best practices. The accumulated expertise that comes from traditions is not in a static state, rather it is a process that continues.

I hope these examples serve to explain the type of thinking behind the work that we do at ICEERS around the globalization of indigenous plant medicines.

What do you think? Should doctors prescribe psychedelics? Should ayahuasca sessions be advertised? Should people follow dietas before taking psychedelics?